Monthly Archives: July 2018

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But as Butina’s espionage job description was not inked in the blood of the SVR, she may have not understood where she stood on the scale of grays that leads from mere affinities to espionage. Quoting CNN,

Butina was being squeezed financially, by inadequate financial support from the Russians.

She had the notion that returning to Russia would not be safe. Only an explicit threat, of Russian origin, could reverse the expected reward for service to the Russian state.

She contemplates an offer from the SVR to become a spy, with a note to that effect in her apartment.

Conclusions:

Butina is likely the victim of manipulation by the Russians, to force her to accept SVR employment. Perhaps the next step of her “development” involved transitioning to secure work habits and clandestine communications. So they wanted to squeezer her into becoming a “real spy”.

She did not understand the legal difference between a domestic political operator/lobbyist, and an agent of a foreign power. The job activities can be so similar, the differences blur. It all depends on who you’re working for.

To work for the SVR, which she may have been resisting in spite of severe pressure, she would have had to give up something that she didn’t want to part with. What was it? The burial of her identity beneath a rigid mask?

In factual comparison, she may be a little less gray than Harry Dexter White, or the numbers of communist sympathizers in government between the 30’s and the 50’s, the lingering overhang of a romantically viewed Russian Revolution. Yet people are still arguing about whether White was a spy.

So why prosecute Maria Butina? These reasons contend in the mind of a prosecutor:

A strong FARA case. The F.B.I. is very reluctant to submit a case to federal prosecutors unless it’s very strong. Winning is part of the mystique that serves as a deterrent, and keeps strong the incentive for the defendant to plea-bargain.

A conviction, even a plea-bargain, strengthens future cases against unnamed U.S. citizens, of whom one is likely Paul Erickson.

To raise awareness of Americans in politics. That friendly Russian could be a Russian agent. The prosecution, or follow-on cases, must serve as a cautionary tale.

A cautionary tale of what? It would be easier if we had a word for it. The word “treason” has had some play recently. But in the U.S. prosecutions for treason have been restricted to strongly symbolic political offenses, with the Constitutional requirement of two witnesses to the same act.

So those who spy, conspire, or subvert are prosecuted under a miscellany of other statutes, for which there is no single bad word. “Betrayal” might be general enough, but it has no legal meaning. The offenses in this article are all covered by FARA, the Foreign Agents Registration Act. But the name of the act sounds more like a technical violation than betrayal of your country.

At least two former Reaganites, former warriors of the “Evil Empire”, have been caught up in this moral confusion, It should be no surprise that some Republicans a generation younger than Dana Rohrbacher and Paul Erickson are naive about the dangers.

What’s missing is the equivalent of a stop-look-listen rule for interacting with Russians. The confusion has to do with Russia’s current dual nature. In place of Bolshevik romance, it has a decent domestic government, compared to what came before. It has a system of state capitalism that superficially resembles our own. The similarities serve as a cover for a foreign policy of subversion in the West.

The case of Maria Butina has lurid aspects. As with Anna Chapman, it involves the attraction of influential men on the basis of power, ego, gain, and sex, cloaked as “mutual interest”. Once you understand the approach, it’s very easy to recognize. But political operatives, professional spin artists, are themselves strangely vulnerable in their search for the edge that will take them to the top. The Butina story is an old one, but it has value in deterrence.

To all members of the political strata, three word of advice. Ironically, they were coined by a Reaganite:

Prediction is not about reading minds. In place of it, we have empathy, not the emotionally expressive kind, but the kind that enables one to “get inside somebody’s head.” It amounts to running another person’s thought processes inside one’s own brain. It does not lead to infallible understanding, but it gives the predictor an edge over someone to whom the person in question is a complete black box.

I recognize a possible explanation for Trump’s words in his career as a real estate developer in NYC, particularly before Rudy Giuliani cleaned the place up. In the 70’s and 80’s, behind the fancy facades of Midtown, there lurked the Mafia. Everything that had to do with construction, the Mafia raked off from. Everything that had to do with permitting, politicians raked off from. Even inside Trump’s own organization, there was the threat that money for a purpose, such as buying loyalty, would end up in the hands of the rapacious.

At the time, it was said that the Mafia owned the sidewalk you walked on. Even today, the Mafia has a strong presence in the concrete business. To avoid having your concrete “watered”, you had to make the right friends. To have your garbage collected, you had to have the right friends. To avoid having your building vandalized in myriad little ways, to avoid union “trouble”, you had to have the right friends. The Italian Mafia lingers with a lower profile. But organized crime, and the threat it poses to real estate, and the many unions involved, will never go away. This was what Trump had to grapple with in his crucible years.

There is an address popular among leaders to those that they command: “I expect the best of you”, or, “I hope you will live up to my expectations.” The root of it is the idea that trust is a gift, which the recipient will try not to devalue. It’s about personal connection. Shades of this can also be seen in Trump’s approach to Kim Jong-un. (Politico) Trump praises Kim Jong Un as ‘very honorable’.

Dealing with the Mob, there is no law. There is only personal connection. This is is the origin of what some have called Trump’s overly personal presidency. This is behind Trump’s desire for personal loyalty of members of his administration. If you wanted to heal relations with Don Corleone, how would you approach him?

I wouldn’t have suggested exonerating Putin. On the other hand, beating Putin over the head, as a matter of principle, or to deter what is already happening again, has been shown ineffective. Yet on the other hand, Trump could argue it’s a throwaway, a gesture he can give without material consequence. If this is so, Trump will continue to support the efforts of the intelligence community to disrupt the next wave of Russian hacking.

Vladimir Putin has stood the test of time through four American presidents, but from Donald Trump he is looking for one thing in particular: to be elevated on the world stage, away from global isolation...That goal has been achieved before their first handshake here.

According to the CNN theory of world history, which ranks in eminence with Arnold Toynbee, the crucial factors of historical turns are fetes and “optics” Their justification is the famous work, “World History Through the Lens of PR, Volume I”, which proves that the History of the World is just one photo op after another. Just as Reuters captured the recent North Korea events as a series of handshake photos.

“We can say confidently that Putin’s political risks are lower than those of President Trump,” said Andrey Kortunov, head of RIAC, a Moscow think-tank close to the Russian Foreign Ministry….“Putin has less to lose and more to gain because he does not have a domestic opposition, a potentially hostile legislature, and is not begin investigated like Trump.

Even the Russians “believe.” This leaves no one in either camp to be influenced in any way, unless you count watchers in sports bars, who are likely to forget it in their alcoholic haze. Things which are universally believed are not likely to be true. Especially, ideas like prestige.

So the summit has been turned into a Simon Cowell talent competition about who has the best singing dog. Scroll back recent history, and try tracing the flow of history in terms of media events. You won’t find it.

Both CNN and Reuters have fallen into a trap, interpreting events in terms they are familiar with. CNN knows media, so they interpret the summit optically. Reuters is primarily a business information service, so they offer “business statistics” about Trump and Putin.

Optics is relevant to domestic politics. Business statistics are relevant to economics. The statistics of who calls who is relevant to the NSA and DHS, but not to the Reuters reader. How does this kind of journalism help the CNN or Reuters reader understand foreign affairs? Answer: Not at all. The real issues are buried by puff pieces. Both Reuters and CNN have done excellent pieces. But this is not their finest hour.

Imagine for a moment that I am tasked with authoring an executive summary for the upcoming Trump-Putin summit. There isn’t room for historical justification or the semi-literary style so popular with foreign policy journalism. And it has to be self contained, so I can’t tell POTUS to go read Kennan’s Long Telegram. Instead, here’s a quote from the first modern Russia analyst:

...From the very first ghastly dawn of her existence as a state, she had to breathe the atmosphere of despotism, she found nothing but the arbitrary will of an obscure Autocrat at the beginning and end of her organization. Hence arises her impenetrability to whatever is true in Western thought. Western thought when it crosses her frontier falls under the spell of her Autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself. Hence the contradictions, the riddles, of her national life which are looked upon with such curiosity by the rest of the world. The curse had entered her very soul; Autocracy and nothing else in the world has moulded her institutions, and with the poison of slavery drugged the national temperament into the apathy of a hopeless fatalism...

These are the words of the first modern Russia analyst,Joseph Conrad, from “Autocracy and War“, quoted from page 44 of The North American Review, Vol. 181, No. 584, July 1905. You might know Conrad better for Lord Jim, Nostromo, or Heart of Darkness. But with apologies to Vladimir Putin, these words from 1905, if not literally true today, are the foundation of modern Russia. And much of the foundation shows through cracks in the facade. Conrad was interested in Russia because the land of his birth, Poland, was the plaything of Prussia, Russia, and Austria. Mind these words, and don’t fall under the spell:

Western thought when it crosses her frontier falls under the spell of her Autocracy and becomes a noxious parody of itself.

Russia’s ruler, Vladimir Putin, is a romantic nationalist, torn between a reverence for the past that Conrad condemns and a future that, with increasing urgency, he wants to bring to Russia – but on his own terms.

Putin is not Russia. He is a product of Russia, half-modern and half traditional. He has not yet reconciled the two. His power is based on balancing constituencies; his freedom to act is overestimated in the West.

Russia is not Putin. Russia is better described as the ghost of Conrad’s description. But as with all things about people and nations, there are many descriptions, useful in spite of errors.

In 1953, following the death of Stalin, collective leadership was restored to the Soviet Union. Until 1985, with the death of Konstantin Chernenko, the Soviet government was characterized by bureaucratic inertia, what foreign affairs wonks call “policy.” The Soviets were more inclined to continue a behavior than to suddenly change or innovate. Collective leadership deprived the Soviet Union of tactical flexibility. The elderly, collective leadership did not approve of Khrushchev’s playing poker with the Cuban Missile Crisis, and he was deposed as premier in 1964.

Putin has tactical flexibility that the old system of collective leadership lacked.

The stability of Russia is not based on tradition. It’s based on Putin.

Because stability is provided by the role of one person, agreements could come undone very quickly.

Russian foreign policy identifies the U.S. as the strongest state. So it is Russia’s goal to reduce the power of the U.S. Many aspects of Russia’s foreign policy are explained by traditional balance of power.

There are various explanations for Russia’s hostility towards the West:

Recreate the Iron Curtain as a tier of buffer states.

Hold onto Crimea and eastern Ukraine.

Eastward expansion of NATO. George F. Kennan was emphatic about it at the time it occurred. It may be Kissinger’s pov also.

Putin’s traditional mindset, and the strong presence in government of former KGB. By this line of thought, it would have occurred anyway.

The collective leadership of the Soviet Union was composed of professional politicians. In the new Russia, these are replaced by KGB, industrialists, and organized crime.

In the Soviet Union, the KGB was subservient to the collective leadership and the party. In Russia, the KGB is the leadership.

The rate of assassinations on foreign soil, and the broad use of poisons against external and internal opponents, is new. Although the Soviet Union used poisons, the leadership had a normal human fear of them.

Putin can’t back up, or he becomes vulnerable to Russian nationalists.

Putin can’t be placated, because he is not Russia.

Russia is a natural resource state, subject to the “oil curse” of civil corruption.

Russian business practices are not compatible with national security.

By reducing the mobility of Russian assets, sanctions are a helpful counter to subversion cloaked as economic activity.

How can we avoid the “spell” described by Joseph Conrad,. which is thinking we understand the place? We could avoid the illusion entirely with a simple stratagem: Watch and wait for a change in behavior. Russia engages in many inimical activities, including subversion, assassination, and unsafe intercepts, with no measurable benefit to Russia. Cessation of these activities would convey meaning that words cannot.

But since it is Russian dogma to subvert a stronger power, what is the catalyst for change? The reasoning that the U.S. is the greatest threat is moronically outdated: The U.S. gives strength to Europe, the historical source of threats.

It’s not something that can be solved by a summit. I’ve suggested that the Skinner Box approach, rapid fire carrot-and-stick, might be a help. Kissinger pioneered “linkage” for the same purpose. This could change the way Putin, consummate tactician, plays the game, but not the game itself.

Only the rise of China can do that. At some point in the future, Russian strategists will identify China as the greater threat. This prediction, about two adjoining land powers that were at war in 1969, has more historical precedent than any other.

As with a spy network, the elaborate network created to support assassinations is typically discovered by a dangling thread, poor tradecraft, visibility, or pattern that does not disclose the full extent. A network is typically followed for years without arrests, with observations of a few operators progressively leading to the discovery of others. Only imminent threat forces investigators to take action, possibly leaving undetected operators in place.

The exception to careful planning is post breakup Russia. While at their best, Russians still excel at the undetectable murder, their reputation has been sullied by high profile embarrassments, amateurish exploits involving high tech poisons, such as the poisoning of Alexander Litvinenko, and the contamination of half of Salisbury with Novichok A-234. It suggests that, contrary to the almost automatic “Putin approved…” theory of assassinations, there are multiple entities in Russia that initiate, including the SVR, and multiple entities that execute, including possible freelancers.

This hypothesis has just received a little extra support from (CNN) Two people poisoned by same nerve agent used on ex-spy, police say. This is likely the result of bungling; the Russian operatives seem to have had a poison leakage problem. Tales of the old KGB reveal they had their share of drunks and bunglers. But at the institutional level, they strove for perfection. There would have been consequences; the operatives would have been cashiered.

As with the recent misadventure of Russian mercenaries in Syria (Newsweek: ‘A Total F***up’: Russian Mercenaries in Syria Lament U.S. Strike That Killed Dozens), and the Litvinenko hit, this implies multiple entities, not inherited from the Soviet Union, with varying degrees of competence, which may not be in complete control of the Kremlin. A sentence from one of Putin’s speeches following his reelection appeals to “the clans”, not to take actions that damage Russia.

If you dig into the subjects of the above paragraphs, you’ll notice that these operations come in three noxious flavors:

With the use of simple means, such as bombs and hand weapons, an operation requires a large footprint, with elaborate logistics, deception, concealment, and elaborate preparations for escape.

With exotic poisons, the fact of murder can be concealed. An operation can have a small footprint, as with Litvinenko and the Skripals.

At the height of the dark art, the Russians commit murders that speak as unsolvable crimes, such as (my opinion) the death of Mikhail Lesin (see Mikhail Lesin, a Kremlin Hit, a Theory, Part 1, Part 2, and Takeaway) and (my opinion) the death of Gareth Williams.

Iranian operations have been of the first category, requiring large footprints vulnerable to discovery and interdiction. The disadvantage of discussion in advance of public disclosure is the broad suspicion of political motive. Quoting The Slate,

Iran and Russia share the distinction of running the only assassination programs now threatening the West. Russian means tend towards the sophisticated, with operations varying from sophisticated to amateurish-as-if-by-freelancers. Iran’s methods are more conventional, hand weapons and explosives. requiring larger, more vulnerable footprints. But there are no amateurs among the Quds Force.